Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 19, 2012 @12:06PM
from the in-other-arbitrary-news dept.

mikejuk writes "GIF started out as a humble acronym 25 years ago, entered common parlance as the format used for web graphics and now achieves fame as a verb by becoming Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year 2012. GIF as a noun has always been an all-capital letter noun. Becoming a verb has caused problems concerning the use of capital and lower case letters. The common form is to keep the noun in caps and add the verbal endings in lower case — as in GIFed,GIFing), However, an all lower-case spelling with the f duplicated (giffed, giffing) is also being used."

...Aside from the odd animated gif here and there, I've not really thought I'd encountered one in a LONG time...

Shocked to see it as word of the year...

Even in 2012, animated gifs are more common than you give them credit for. People are even doing really neat things with them such as this [tumblr.com] (and I've got to admit, a 256 color palette is hard to work with, but they've made it look pretty good for the most part.)

I do concur though, it's odd for it to be the "word of the year" this far after its prime.

PNG is good if you dont mind blocky distortion around your line art too!

Huh? PNG supports 24 and 32-bit colour- more than enough for anti-aliasing- and 8-bit transparency so you're either assuming that the limitations of GIF are those of PNG, or you're using an old browser that doesn't handle transparent PNGs correctly and messes up the background.

All dictionaries do. They're anthropological documents, really. They document observations of an aspect of human behavior: the words they use and what they mean when they use them. It boggles my mind that anyone gets confused about that, thinking they do anything more...

GIF is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format, not for Giraffe interchange format. So the G in GIF is hard, just like the G in Graphic.

Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, not Light Amplification by Ztimulated Emission of Radiation. Therefore the 's' in laser is unvoiced and should be pronounced "lay-sir" not "lay-zer."

Actually, no, that's still not right. The A in Amplification is a short A not a long one, so the word should be pronounced "lah-sir." But wait, the E in emission is long, so it should actually be "lah-seer."

Or we could admit that that's not how acronym pronunciation works and stop being dumbshits.

Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, not Light Amplification by Ztimulated Emission of Radiation. Therefore the 's' in laser is unvoiced and should be pronounced "lay-sir" not "lay-zer." Actually, no, that's still not right. The A in Amplification is a short A not a long one, so the word should be pronounced "lah-sir." But wait, the E in emission is long, so it should actually be "lah-seer."

That's why one always uses finger quotes when referring to a device that I call a "Layzer".

I don't think acronyms work like that, otherwise NASA and PETA would sound totally different than they are currently pronounced. (Nehsah instead of Nasah, Pehtah instead of peetah) Not to mention fubar (fuhbar?).

There are plenty of words pronounced with a "gentle" G, such as Gentoo. However, I think the logic (hey, another soft g) is that the initial G in GIF stands for graphics, so it should be pronounced the same way.

"giga" has the same greek root as the word "giant". the soft "g" (as in "gist") is the original and preferred pronunciation of "giga". tech nerds are to blame for getting it wrong with the common pronunciation of "gigabyte".

In football (the association one), it's quite common to have animated GIFs of various match events, a poor man's highlights video. Often enough, these appear during the match itself, much before the videos do. So this is one case where someone might logically ask, "Has that goal been GIFed yet?"

In various message boards it seems also to be popular to have some short video clip in as your avatar picture. Usually of a celebrity doing some expression over and over. In every freaking message. To complete the experience you should have the specs of your computer in your signature, down to the RAM timings, in a huge font.

Well, MNG might have had more traction if Firefox had kept support. Even for the "light" version of MNG.Initially the accusation was that MNG took up too much space in Firefox (entire kilobytes more!) amusing in this age of slapping in megabytes of libs for the latest camera/microphone HTML5 support.Anyway, the MNG guys went and stripped down libmng (minimal support) so that there was no increase in resulting size.

At that point, the reason changed to concerns about security. Which, is reasonable I guess,

If that's your experience, you're almost certainly using an inferior PNG encoder (yes, PNG compression works in ways that effectively allow 'bad implementations' to create larger files:/.. one of the big things that held it back was a common misconception that it gave inferior compression due to a popular image manipulation package (Photoshop) that had a shitty PNG implementation. With a proper encoder, basically the only time GIF should give you smaller filesizes, is on very small images (e.g. 10x10 pixe

The problem is that it is not the default. When you compress something with PNG, more often than not whatever program you're using will decide to use a full 24 bit colorspace with alpha channel added and bloat the file up. With GIF that never happens, so people think GIFs are just smaller. Of course GIFs often look like dithered messes too, so there is a tradeoff.

People turn little video clips into animated GIFs for joke purposes. Theyâ(TM)re not posting MNG (or whatever the carefully designed and basically unused animated PNG format was called) to their Tumblrs.

It's been obsoleted by PNG for more thanlike 15 years now. They could just as well choose floppy.

Because it takes several years and must meet several requirements in order to become an "official" English word. Otherwise they would be adding thousands of words every year used for one week and then forgotten.

The issue with the verb form is not how to handle adding suffixes to an upper-case initialism, the issue is that people would thing do verb that noun in the first place. While I've heard lots of people talk about GIFs, I would get all GIFed if I actually heard someone verb "GIF." That's just GIFing stupid.

I can't say it has never happened but I've certainly never heard anyone use GIF as a verb and I'm old enough to remember when GIF images were a new thing. Never even occurred to me that anyone would use it as a verb.

Of course I resolutely refuse to use Google as a verb as well. Google is a company name and the activity I'm usually doing with their website is called "searching" which is a perfectly satisfactory verb that even works when using a website not made by Google.

I can't say it has never happened but I've certainly never heard anyone use GIF as a verb and I'm old enough to remember when GIF images were a new thing. Never even occurred to me that anyone would use it as a verb.

I would suggest that the people using GIF as a verb were not around when GIFs were new.

I've never heard anyone use GIF except to describe an image that is a GIF because they are doing something with graphics. It isn't exactly a day to day word or something laymen use... random teens on Facebook would still have no idea what a GIF is.

Even if they are aware of what GIFs are how many of them are using the word on a daily basis let alone using GIF as a verb. I'd imagine JPEG and PNG are going to be used far more. Yup, just looking over the Reddit front page, I see two PNG's (and neither was made by the poster) and a gallary full of JPEG's. There is nothing about grabbing images off the net and linking to them or posting them elsewhere that requires knowing what a GIF is. Maybe knowing that some pictures end in.gif but you aren't going to

If I'm reading this right, the word GIF has been around a long time, but it is "word of the year" because of the new usage, as a verb. I've never heard this usage, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it could mean. Does "to gif" mean "to convert an image to GIF format"? Does it mean "to capture an image in GIF format"? Neither one of these sounds like something that would be a very common usage, so I'm sure I'm missing something. What does this new verb mean?

First of all, you're not suppose to use the word you're describing in the definition, and here they defined it by using its noun form. Secondly, I believe it's a much larger offense to use the technology you're describing to make your announcement about the word, which they've clearly done by 'GIFing' the WOTY announcement. On top of that, I think I've seen far more clever words coined on the Unwords and Urban dictionaries this year.